by Gina Rossi
“My pleasure, John. Any more news on exactly when he’ll be home?”
“We’ll know soon,” comes the habitual answer. “There’s one more thing. Will you be able to hang around after Lucas gets home? Until things are back on an even keel?”
I say I will. Does he know something I don’t? Probably. Definitely. We hang up. Why does John leave it so long to tell me things? He’s not aware I care. Why am I so anxious?
Unsettled, I go outside to the car, triple checking that the sea horse door is locked.
Chapter Twelve
Agat is in the house; I know it. I skip the friendly-knock routine and bang on the door. Nothing. Should I walk around the back? No, I’m not comfortable doing that. For now, it’s a step too far. Frustrated, annoyed, angry, a little frightened, I go back to the car, sit there for a while and think, half-hoping Agat makes a voluntary appearance, half-hoping she doesn’t. Why am I even messing around here, when I should have gone straight to the sheriff?
An old blue ford truck stops beside me on the gravel road, and a man hangs an elbow out of the window. “Can I help you?”
“Not really. I’m looking for the lady who lives here, but she’s not in a social mood.”
“She has mood swings for sure, depending on what messages she’s receiving from the spirits of her ancestors.” He winks. “Agat is my mother’s ant, so I know how she can be.”
“Ant?”
“My grandmother’s sister. Half-sister, in reality.”
Aunt. “I see. Well, I’ll have to come back another time.”
“I’m Angelina, by the way.”
Angelina? He, no, she leans through the window and offers her right hand for me to shake.
“I’m Lara Fairmont.”
“Yeah, I know. The Blue Rocks’ nanny.”
We crank hands like the pistons on a steam engine. Wow, she is strong.
“Most people call me Angie.” She drops my hand, sitting back in the cab, drumming her broad fingers on the faded paintwork of the truck’s door. “You must be kinda special if Lucas Dalton lets you drive that badass Jeep of his.”
I laugh. “Nothing special about me. Anything but.”
She laughs too, and thumps the door panel with the flat of her hand. “Then you’re my kinda gal. You got time for coffee?”
“Um—”
“You came all the way out here to see Agat, but she ain’t playing ball, so you got time.”
“I’m going to wait here a while, until she’s in the mood to talk. It’s urgent.”
“Mind telling me what it’s about?”
I hesitate, my mouth dry. “She, um, left some signs, little crosses, at Blue Rocks. I’d like to know what they mean.”
Angie’s face changes. “Shit!” She throws the truck into neutral and yanks the handbrake. Leaving the engine running, she slams out of the cab and stomps over the road, skirting the house straight to the back, like I didn’t want to.
I wait a good ten minutes, guilty that I’ve—ridiculously—told tales like a child. The chug-a-chug of the old Ford engine and its warm, oily smell keep me company until Angie comes back, striding on chunky legs, shaking her cropped head.
“Follow me,” she calls. “We’ll do that coffee.”
She takes off in a cloud of dust. I turn the car in Agat’s driveway. There’s no movement at any of the windows, but I know she’s watching. I feel her eyes like she’s sitting on the dashboard, staring at me, inches away.
Following Angie, I’m aware I probably shouldn’t. Are my life-preservation antennae set too low? Or am I a dumb city-dweller who is out of touch with the fundamentals of human trust? I drive after her. If her place looks dodgy, or if it’s too remote, or I feel threatened in any way, I’ll simply stay in the car and leave. Brave enough to seek the hostile company of Agat, I can hack this. I lock the doors and drive on, along an ever-narrowing road. The trees close in, leaving only a thread of blue sky visible between their dark points. We turn right, we turn left, and left again, and again, then right.
Will I ever get out of here?
Angie slows on the bumpy track and pulls well over to the right to let another car pass, talking to the driver as she eases by. I recognize the car, and the woman, one of the school mums I’m pretty sure. Yes, I’m right. I don’t know her name, but there are the twins, Ben and Grace, in the back, waving to Angie like mad.
That’s better. We drive on, past a sign that says Little Harbor and through a white, five-barred gate. Angie parks next to dark red barn conversion, with grey roof and white window frames—under a magnificent spreading tree that looks a lot like a London plane.
“Maple,” Angie tells me. “We get a ton of syrup from this one.” She points to a pipe and tap set into the bark.
Maple syrup from maple trees? Is she having me on?
“Carrie says sorry she couldn’t stop. The twins are mighty late for that birthday party.”
“Carrie?”
“We passed her in the red car on the way in. Carrie, my partner.”
“Oh, right.” I see. “I’ve seen her at school, but we haven’t met.” I follow Angie to the house, stopping to admire a bank of handsome purple hydrangeas flourishing alongside the path.
“These are gorgeous!” I’ve never seen such beautiful plants.
Angie takes a large, leathery leaf, like she’s holding the plant’s hand. “I love them like my own kids. Grew them from cuttings Lucas’s mom gave me years ago, back in the day when Blue Rocks had a magnificent garden.”
I’m amazed. Now, the sad remnants of garden at Blue Rocks are nothing more than evidence of malnourishment and neglect, of something beautiful gone to waste.
We go up the steps onto the porch, where a row of blue Adirondack chairs stand in a row, facing the lake. Angie tells me to sit. She disappears through the front entrance, the screen door swinging shut behind her. I wait in the cool shade of the long porch, admiring the smooth sweep of lawn down to the water’s edge. There’s a coppice of silver birches planted on a curved finger of land to the left. I spot a weathered teak bench between the pale trunks, where there must be a glorious view across the water. To the right, echoing the curve is a semi-circular jetty which starts out at the foot of a giant willow. The birches and the jetty almost enclose a full circle of green water—the Little Harbor of Emerald Lake. I relax, soothed, revelling in exquisite birdsong. How could bad mischief be afoot amid such beauty? I’m overreacting, aren’t I? Agat is obviously a local character who has episodes of—
“The little monsters finished the milk, so I hope you take it black.” Angie’s back, handing me a mug.
“As it comes, thanks.”
She flops into the chair beside me. “So, Carrie and I have been together ten years, and we adopted the twins back in 2010. We prefer to live out here, well out of the fast lane, even though the good folks of Lobster Cove are real charitable and broad-minded.”
That’s good to know. “If I had a house like this, I wouldn’t live in town either.”
“It’s a beaut, isn’t it? We saved it in the nick of time. The roof was all but gone by the time the sale went through. Lucas helped us renovate. He did all the architectural and engineering work.”
“He did?”
“Yeah. A real closet architect, that one.”
I look around at the solid tradition in every detail—the door hinges, the porch railing, the shutters, the subtle richness of the red colouring, the white trim, all set on blue fire by the splendid hydrangeas—and marvel. Who would have thought?
She slings a thigh over an arm of the chair. “Blue Rocks is a pretty nice house. Lucas virtually rebuilt that too. You must enjoy going home there.”
I laugh. “Unfortunately it’s not home.”
“Agat seems to think it is, for you.”
“She does?” What?
Angie gazes at the lake, her eyes narrow. “Agat isn’t, y’know, psychic as such, but she’s pretty damn spot-on on most things. She thinks you got feeling
s for Lucas.”
Now I’m looking at the lake.
“She thinks,” Angie goes on, “you should stay away from him. She says he’s bad. That’s why she’s doing all this weird stuff.”
I watch a small swallow, dipping low to drink, touching the surface, pushing dainty, overlapping circles of ripples over the still water. “Do you think Lucas is bad?”
“Nah. He’s all right.” She chuckles. “Hell, there was I time I coulda almost straightened out for a guy like Lucas, know what I mean?”
“So what’s Agat got against him?”
Angie turns in the chair to face me, legs tucked under, mug held in both hands, like she’s cold. “You know about Bonny, Lucas’s wife?”
“I know she drowned and that some people in Lobster Cove aren’t so sure it was an accident. I know there was a trial, and Lucas got off.”
She nods. “Agat gave Bonny facial treatments once or twice a month, so—she claimed—she knew something of what went on. For example, the night Bonny drowned, Agat knew that Bonny and Lucas had a fishing trip planned to Phantom Creek, that side of the lake.” Angie thrusts her chin out, glancing across the water to the opposite shore, and then back at me. “Emerald Lake isn’t so much a lake as a complex series of saltwater inlets, and you really have to know your way around. Lucas does, and they planned to take a canoe and a tent and spend the night up there, chilling out. The creek is the most beautiful part of the lake. You have to see it to believe it.”
“What about Alice? Where was she?”
“Lucas’s parents lived in Lobster Cove back then. His mother was still alive. They had Alice for the night. She was a year old. Anyhow, Bonny went to Boston for a big party, promising Lucas she’d be back in time to go camping, but she came home mighty late. Lucas’s story, in court, went along the lines that they argued and he took off by himself. In the morning he came home to find Bonnie washed up on the Blue Rocks beach, dead.”
“Why didn’t Lucas go to the party with Bonny?”
“Who knows, but rumour had it Bonny was seeing someone in Boston. Someone at that party.”
“Odd that Lucas didn’t go along and keep an eye on her.”
Angie shrugs. “Unfaithful is unfaithful. How’s keeping an eye gonna help?”
We sit in silence for a minute, watching tiny blue-grey birds with black heads fuss about in the lower boughs of a big pine tree. “What you are seeing there,” Angie points, “are black-capped chickadees, the state bird of Maine.”
“They’re lovely. Positively acrobatic.”
She chuckles. “Sociable little things, patriotic too. The tree they’re in is an eastern white pine. The cone and tassel of that tree is our state flower.”
Head back, I look up to the top of the pine. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a tall, straight tree.”
“Those pines played a major role in the history of Maine for hundreds of years, for building houses, ships’ masts and so on. Even for the Royal Navy.”
“How interesting.”
“You’re getting a whole history lesson, right here in the garden.”
We watch the chickadees until a fat mourning dove lands on a branch above and scatters the lot.
“Lucas managed to source a whole lot of old pine wood to use in this house, when we renovated. He picked it up somewhere the other side of Bangor. So, history lives on, all around us.”
I nod, watching the little birds regroup in a bush closer to the water, and guide Angie back to the original conversation. “So Lucas. What happened to make people think he had killed his wife?”
Angie puts her empty coffee cup on the floor, sits back again in the chair and folds her arms. “Agat saw Lucas driving back to Blue Rocks past her house, before sunrise that morning, alone.”
“But did anyone seeing him leaving Blue Rocks the previous night with Bonny?”
Angie shakes her head. “Not a soul. Not one. Agat claims Lucas pretended to make up with Bonny, brought her up to the lake under cover of night and romantic pretence, killed her, slung her in the boot, took her home and tossed her into the sea when he got back to Blue Rocks, unseen in the pre-dawn darkness.”
“That’s crazy! Why would he, anybody, do that? Why not dump her in the lake?”
“Because there were no rocks and surf to bash her head, to cover up the damage he did.”
I frown. “Why didn’t he kill her at Blue Rocks and have done with it?”
“He couldn’t kill her inside,” she says, slowly, “because that would have messed up the house and spread DNA everywhere. And he couldn’t kill her down at the beach because, three years ago, when it all happened, there were younger trees along that road. You could see right over them into the cove at Blue Rocks. Anyone could see what was going on down there. Now that those trees have grown, the cove is only visible in the winter, when the leaves have dropped.”
I thought so.
“Besides, she was a keen sea swimmer, and a good one, but she wouldn’t set foot in a lake.”
“Why?”
“She told Agat the water was too dark.”
Sick, I look out over the lake, gunmetal-grey now in the afternoon sunlight, and shiver. So, wherever Lucas had killed Bonny, it made sense to have her “wash up” on the beach. That way, it looked like the most natural accident in the world.
“Agat said,” Angie goes on, “that Bonny was afraid of the water creatures.”
I look at Angie. “Creatures?”
“Aw.” She waves a hand. “Folklore. Nasty little aquatic pinching creatures called Pimskwawagenowad. And then there’s Dzeedzeebonda, a monster so hideous, he can’t look at himself—”
Dzeedzeebonda?
I think back to what Cherri said, and recall how Agat spoke about Dzeedzeebonda and Lucas like they were one and the same person. Was Lucas too ugly to look at himself? Did he have that much blood on his hands, and in his heart?
“What about Alombegwi—?”
Angie cuts me off. “Alombegwinosis? He’s a shape-shifter, an upsetter of canoes. To see him is to foretell a death by drowning.” She dismisses that chilling statement with another flap of a hand.
“You said Lucas and Bonny took a canoe—”
“Yes. The canoe was one thing, the engagement ring another. Agat’s claim that she had seen Alombegwinosis on the shore of Phantom Creek the evening before Bonny died, was yet another.”
I’m sitting forward in my chair, half-turned to Angie, staring at her. “What happened to the canoe?”
“Lucas lost it. There was a big storm that night. Although he tied the canoe fast to a tree, he says, the wind ripped the rope, and the canoe was washed away. About a year ago, some guy was dredging the shore below his cabin to build a jetty, and he found it, pretty much intact. The cops dragged it off and sent it away for forensic tests, but nothing conclusive came to light. It had been in the water too long. Well hidden, some said.”
My skin cools and prickles. “And the ring?”
Her ring went to Alombegwinosis.
“Yeah, the ring. A crackerjack of a diamond. It disappeared. In court, under oath, Lucas claimed Bonny always took it off when she swam, in case it slipped off her finger in the cold water. When she swam in the cove at Blue Rocks, he said, she always, without fail, attached it to a cork key ring and put it in a crevice in the rocks, always the same place. Some people she knew, folk from the local swimming club, testified to that.”
“It probably got washed away.”
“But the cork would have floated, so it should have washed up, storm or no, like she did. Some folks reckon Lucas took it off her finger before he killed her, not quite able to kiss that amount of money goodbye.”
“That’s not fair.” I look into my mug, half-filled with cold coffee, as dark as midnight.
“Sure isn’t, but there’s no proof. Folks like proof.”
“What happened then?”
“The cops searched the beach and the surrounding shore with dogs and metal detectors, you name it
, but the weather didn’t play ball. The storm pounded that cove for three days and changed the shape of the beaches up and down the coast. There were gales and flooding and destruction everywhere. Emergency services had their hands full and once things had got back to normal, and by the time Lucas had been dragged to court, the heat had kinda gone out of the case.”
“Did Lucas have a good defence lawyer?”
“Damn right he did. The hottest shot from New York, Hank Martinez.”
Hank Martinez. Yes, I’ve heard of him, and I don’t even live on this continent. His lifeblood is the dark side of celebrity scandal, worldwide. “What then?”
“Martinez walked all over the little people of Lobster Cove, ridiculed local traditions, legends and beliefs and got the case thrown out on the first day of the trial. No evidence, no witnesses, nothing real. Said mythological drivel could not be tolerated in a court of law where a man’s freedom was at stake. The town divided. Some said Lucas would be in jail if not for his wealth, that he’d bribed Martinez, that they had some sort of arrangement. Others let it go.”
“What did Bonny’s family think? And her friends?”
“No family. She was fostered her whole life. One family to another. No love lost. As for friends, Bonny knew everyone and everyone knew her, but no one called her a friend. Ladies had to watch their husbands around Bonny Dalton. She didn’t obey the boundaries. She could be a little scary like that, to tell the truth.”
I gather. And I’ve heard enough telling of the truth for a while. “About Agat’s visit to Blue Rocks this morning,” I say, standing up, “and all those little crosses—”
Angie takes my mug. “Can I reheat this? Can I get you a fresh one?”
I glance at my watch. “Thank you, but no. I must go.” I look up and our eyes meet. “Is it a curse?”
“No.” She shakes her head, firm. “No. It’s a little, you know, token. A little sign.”
“To do what?”
“To keep Lucas away, she told me. But that’s hardly going to work, is it? I mean, come on.”
It’s working now.
“Should I tell the sheriff?” I ask.
Angie presses her lips together, shaking her head. She walks with me to the car where we say goodbye. “Pop in anytime, you hear?”